Friday, January 13, 2017

Health Threats from Samaritan Ministries

In the past, I have published Dangers in Samaritan Ministries part 1, part 2, and part 3 (all of which can be accessed here.) This is essentially "Dangers in Samaritan Ministries part 4," but I gave the article a different name, because I am going to be focusing specifically on how one is likely to die early if he takes the medical advice (that is usually disclaimed as not being medical advice) in the Samaritan Ministries newsletter.

Unfortunately, the promotion of quackery, medical nonsense, and non-scientific misinformation in the Samaritan Ministries newsletter seems only to be getting worse. In the May 2016 newsletter, a two-page testimonial is given promoting the dangerous quack Ronald Wheeler, who the Florida Board of Medicine calls "a menace to society." One member of the board indicated that Mr. Wheeler "looks like he's board-certified in medical fraud" and "one of the most dangerous doctors I've seen in a long time." Mr. Wheeler takes desperate people with cancer, fills their mind with nonsense, and refers them to a clinic in Mexico where he is paid for referrals. Patients have suffered serious negative medical consequences from his financially-lucrative quackery. So what does Samaritan Ministries say? They say that he has a 100% cure rate for prostate cancer over the last several years, and from 2006-2013 the rate "drops to 99 percent" (pg. 13)! They give an e-mail address where Samaritan members with prostrate problems can contact Samaritan to get in touch with people who have followed Mr. Wheeler. Not the slightest hint of warning about this predatory huckster is given in the newsletter. The medical advice in the Samaritan Ministries newsletter is dangerous to your health, and this sort of unabashed, unashamed spread of and promotion of life-threatening misinformation is getting worse and worse.

In the June 2016 newsletter, an article entitled "Niacin: The Real Story" mentions someone who was allegedly cured of a disease by taking "60 grams a day – more than 3000 times the RDA" (pg. 7). Taking 3000 times the recommended daily allowance of niacin is very dangerous – it could kill you. You could overdose and require hospitalization at 4.5 grams a day. The article states that everyone should take 100 times the RDA--so God must have designed food very badly, because it would be impossible to get the right amount by eating a balanced diet--and states that sick people should "go up from there" (pg. 11) to an unspecified, unnatural, and dangerous amount. You are actually supposed to artificially consume so much of it that you start "flush[ing],"--that is, start experiencing a dangerous side effect which the article says "is not dangerous, and is actually helpful for determining the optimum dose" (pg. 6). Science demonstrates that "long-term use is associated with liver damage." This Samaritan Ministries article is dangerous.

Why
does medical science ignore this allegedly real disease, the Samaritan
article asks, which the article states has "more and more irrefutable
evidence"? The answer: "the collaboration of some government officials,
Big Pharma, and insurance companies to threaten doctors into betraying
their Hippocratic Oath by denying the existence of chronic Lyme, all in
order to cut costs" (pg. 11). And we thought that the Conspiracy was
actually doctors trying to treat more people to make more money; now
they are refusing to give people long-term antibiotics to treat this
fake disease, and apparently that refusal to give (unnecessary)
antibiotics is also part of the Conspiracy. When doctors prescribe,
that is the Conspiracy; when they don't prescribe, that is also the
Conspiracy, and somehow it is a profit motive in both situations.
Apparently all the doctors who say that chronic Lyme does not exist are
not following the evidence and trying to protect their patients from
harm and unnecessary medication, but are in fear that Big Pharma (which
wants less, not more, medicine dispensed this time, it seems) will come
to get them. Thousands and thousands of doctors, all medical colleges,
medical journals, etc. who deny this imaginary disease are violating
their consciences and the Hippocratic Oath and allowing people to be
sick, although they do not do this with other diseases--they single out this
one and allow people to be sick of it while treating other ones and
curing people of them, even though not treating the other ones would
also save insurance companies' money. The Conspiracy even extends over
the entire globe--in a world where the president of South Africa can
deny that HIV is caused by AIDS, and where world leaders still follow
witchdoctors, "public health services worldwide refuse to acknowledge
the existence of chronic Lyme" (pg. 11). It is amazing how much power
those pharmaceutical companies have to control worldwide public opinion
to reject the Conspiratorial Truth about Chronic Lyme, while those same
companies have no power to prevent China and most of the rest of the
world from ignoring their copyright and patent protections so that
American pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit at all from or
stop copycat imitators based offshore who do no research but reproduce
their products.

Of course, the promoters of Chronic Lyme have no financial interest in anything, but are pure as the driven snow.

The
most dangerous part of this conspiratorial thinking is that someone
with this anti-evidence, conspiratorial mindset will probably believe in
unconventional therapy X or Y when he or a family member gets a
life-threatening disease, and will eat cottage cheese to stop his cancer
instead of doing what would actually work.

False
doctrine is also promoted in the August 2016 Samaritan newsletter--a
Roman Catholic who runs a clinic called "Our Lady of Hope," that is, to
paraphrase, "hope in Mary--our Mary, rather than hoping in Jesus Christ
alone--our God" is promoted as someone who "uses his interaction with
patients to talk about their relationship (or lack thereof) with Jesus,
allowing him to "evangelize in the exam room." (pg. 8) Surely people
will receive tremendous spiritual benefit by being evangelized by a
Roman Catholic at a place called Our Lady of Hope. Perhaps praying to
Mary will also help cure you of Chronic Lyme, although Mary won't help you be
cured of a real disease.

The December 2016 issue continues to promote the quack David Brownsten, who, as I noted in "Dangers in Samaritan Ministries, part 3," has claimed that he can cure Ebola by giving people vitamin
C, but the "Powers-that-Be" are secretly working to prevent people
from being cured from Ebola, while he prescribes levels of megavitamins that can
actually be dangerous and harm people's health. Samaritan is recommending
this quack to people for treating heart disease, despite the fact that he makes the astonishing claim that people need to consume more salt--very dangerous advice for people with heart conditions
(pg. 12). This dangerous quack has multiple books that are reviewed on
the Samaritan website and commended, with not a word of warning.

The January 2017 issue hits a new low--if such is
possible--in its promotion of quackery. This time its "health"
misinformation article, "Sugar alert!" (pgs. 10-11) did not even include
a disclaimer at the end stating that the article was not meant to cure,
treat, etc. disease--while nobody believed the disclaimer anyway, it is
no longer present. While mixing in a number of true statements--of
course, nobody believes that it is healthy for a person to get his
entire caloric intake from table sugar--the article is jam-packed with
misinformation. It defines "sugar" as "sucrose" at the beginning of the
article, although then it warns about glucose and fructose as well.
Sucrose allegedly causes everything from "cancer" to "compromised wound
healin [sic]" to--get this--"low [not high] blood sugar"! What is more,
"fructose" is something "that the body [allegedly] can't use very well"
and is "associated with liver damage" and "livers like those of
alcoholics."

The article never mentions that sucrose,
fructose, and glucose are found in fruits such as apples, bannanas,
apricots, and blackberries--you name the fruit, it will have them in it--as well as the most common
vegetables, from carrots to cabbages. The article preys on popular
ignorance of even the fundamentals of nutritional science and biology.
Of course, the molecules of sugar in these fruits and vegetables are
identical in every way to the molecules of fructose, glucose, and
sucrose in processed sources and the human body treats them in exactly
the same way. (The problem with table sugar is not that it is the cause
of all kinds of diseases, but that it has no useful nutrients in it--it
just gives the body calories, but not vitamins or minerals, has no fiber,
and so on.) The Samaritan article recommends, instead of table sugar,
consuming "coconut . . . sugar" or "honey" or "molasses," leaving out
the fact that these products are full of the identical sucrose,
fructose, and glucose molecules that are allegedy the cause of
practically every disease under the sun.

In conclusion, the idea of Christians sharing medical needs is fantastic. However, the medical advice promoted in the Samaritan Ministries newsletter is inaccurate, expensive, unscientific, conspiracy-mongering, nonsensical, and too often passes from being merely ridiculous to being dangerous to one's health and at times even life-threatening.

9 comments:

Thomas, we have friends who visited the same clinic your friends visited before the wife died. With our friends, the wife had a very dangerous form of cancer, but they caught it early and it was treatable. They had caught it early, which was very rare and was a real blessing.

However, these friends decided to go to the clinic in Mexico, instead of following the advice of the oncologists and having immediately having surgery. She is now dying from the cancer. It seems to have been totally avoidable.

A middle age believer who could have been cured will die a painful death. This is the result of this bad science.

What you report is terrible--what a tragedy. If the US government took a Christian and gave him cancer, everyone would be up in arms for such an evil act of murder. However, when scams like the Oasis of Hope in Tijuana, Mexico (better, Oasis of Death across the border) delude Christians and cause their deaths, it seems that it is not a big deal. That "clinic" will be accountable to God for the blood of the thousands upon thousands of people, and in particular of God's sheep, that it has brought to an eary death.

However, family and friends who encourage others to go to such places will also be accountable. Their hands also will not be free from blood. The sixth commandment does not give us liberty to kill ourselvesor others by rejecting medicine for quackery.

Even though they did not listen, I am very glad that I warned the people that I know and that I later wrote the post exposing the Oasis of Hope as a scam. That post is getting many views--may God use it to save the physical lives of many people, and use the links on it to the gospel as an instrument to save the spiritual lives of the unconverted as well. My conscience is clear, and, I trust, my hands are free from blood.

By the way, do the people who went to the scam artists at the Oasis of Death now recognize that they were scammed, or do they still defend the Oasis as truth?

When scientific medicine does things like examining 10,000 people with a particular type of cancer at a particular stage, giving a particular treatment, and seeing that 9,000 of them are alive 10 years later, they then have a good basis for saying that one has a 90% chance of making it if one pursues legitimate treatment methods for that type of cancer. If, instead of pursuing scientific medicine, one goes with quackery and the cancer progresses to a stage where tests indicate that out of 10,000 people only 50 are alive 10 years later, then one has a good basis for saying that waiting to treat the cancer with real medicine has reduced one's chance for long-term survival from 90% to 0.5%.

Thomas,, I do not have much contact, but I understand they are convinced she was cured and the continuing problems are not cancer but something related. My last report was a few months ago and not entirely reliable. Perhaps things have changed and so I am not certain.

I had the same question about your friend. He and his wife had dinner at my home only a few years ago. I was sad to hear of the situation.

Tony, they can know because they spend more than a decade learning and training, and then another decade accruing real world experience. They can look at a type of cancer, look at the size and position, check to see if it has spread, and based on a huge volume of data make a pretty solid prediction about the survivability and best course of treatment.

This is based on thousands and thousands of similar cases. One thing doctors are good at is documentation. You could probably search a database and find every case of lung cancer in the US for the past 40 years, how it was treated, how it responded, and the condition of the patient. A good doctor can no doubt use that information to make reliable plans.

This is the same way a 60 year old lifetime master mechanic can hear an engine and know what is wrong. I could never do that, and do not understand how they do it, but that does not mean they are wrong. My lack of knowledge and experience does not invalidate the mechanic's knowledge and experience.

You confuse me. Two undefined terms in your SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE vs QUACKERY thing. Nice thinking for me while it lasted - just can't see how this fits in with the "epistamulogy" articles here. Nor am ask asking for explanation. Why don't churches discipline bad medicine or do yours?. Thanks and God Bless.

You are correct that people are not cars. If you are trying to argue with this that the cells in the human body don't respond to the same physical laws that the molecules do in cars, then you are not correct.

You are correct that people are not cars. If you are trying to argue with this that the cells in the human body don't respond to the same physical laws that the molecules do in cars, then you are not correct.

Really? I'm not anymore sure that's even much worth responding to over cars (gen 2:7 - man is different - doctrine of man 101). These is alternutive facts! I think calling people and their ideas "quackery" is kind of namecalling Pastor Kent Branden say was wrong when he write about "heretic" a whiles back? Not so?So why read namecaller site? Not edifying.

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